Posts tagged “Television”

Hilarious. Is Kanye West off the charts mental? “Biggest rock star in the world?” I am getting older (also known as rusty) and somewhat disconnected from youth culture but how did I miss that rap has now become rock? Listening to Kanye I can’t help but think that like many before him his commercial success has gone not just to his head but way above into the stratosphere and so far up where there’s no oxygen. Without oxygen to the brain we become delirious. And the very idea that Fendi is supposed to take his designs! Why? Because he’s black? My advice to Kanye (ok, not like he gives two cents) is that if he, really, is that good he should give two thumbs to the entire “white” fashion establishment and set up his own fashion label and store and sell his leather jogging pants direct to the public. I can think of nothing more hip than narcissistic celebrities in sweltering LA collapsing from hyperthermia while jogging in KW designer leather pants. That would be so cool.

Some people need a good dose of reality and basic rational thinking. I’m thinking, Kanye?

In the famous study by Walter Mischel from the 1960s, kids left alone in a room to contemplate the yummy prospect of the single marshmallow placed in front of them were promised two marshmallows if they could wait until an adult returned to the room before eating. The children who waited patiently were later found to have achieved higher exam scores and to have earned higher salaries blah blah blah and by extrapolation I suspect to have been happier and more fulfilled than the kids who took to their gastric pleasures instantly.

So, is this a trusted principle for living? Waiting. Patience. Delayed gratification. The right bus. The right job. The right love. The right word. The right home. Does life promise rewards such as our dreams? At least in the study cited above the kids knew they would have their extra marshmallow. But in life we simply do not know for certain that the reward we have dreamed will be ours. What we do know is that the pleasure that we do see is in the here and now. And it is oh so easy to reach out and partake of the dopamine that awaits the brain. Afterall, a bird in hand …

But if the waiting itself could be made pleasurable, the journey and not the destination, then a whole new ball game opens up. Labour rather than delivery could become a raison d’etre. It’s like the high that comes after a good workout session even though you had not wanted the sweaty grind in the first place. And if one should die before the prize is given it wouldn’t matter in the least for the fun was in the doing and not in the getting. But perhaps I am, like The Borgias, being too dramatic and the wreath of gold waiting at the limit of our forbearance is like a chimaera, a mirage, a phantasm, an illusion. There is just one way to find out.

Murdoch!
Murdoch, the great conjurer. Nothing he says can be taken for reality and nothing he forgets can be ignored. He forgets what everyone else wishes to remember and remembers what no one recalls. Therein lies the secret of our successful captain of industry. Lie pathologically often enough, and sure as full moon follows its half, your own Crucible of Truth is forged, at once astonishing and terrifying in its resplendence. Who could have thought that this former Labour supporter would celebrate a life suborning feckless political leaders, to exploit the self-same workers, vacuous though they are, that he once worked to serve. Yet there he is, all eighty one years, without integrity or dignity claiming ignorance and protesting his innocence. I have no doubt that he will go to his grave with the priest’s cross signed over his grinning face; absolved of all sin. After all, God always forgives provided one repents just before He casts your sinning ass into hell. But on this earth, history won’t be so forgiving to Mr Murdoch. Infamy survives all psychopaths.

On my way back to London from visiting my boyfriend in Copenhagen for the weekend, he handed me an article by David Foster Wallace titled “Television and US Fiction”. The article had been recommended by a precocious American student and dealt with American fixation with television and its influence on and it being influenced by American fiction and culture. At 40 pages long, I only managed to finish reading it on the flight. One thing that caught my attention was his description of a scene from Don DeLillo’s book “White Noise” where a group of spectators were at a barn famous only for being spectated. There were people watching people watching people watching the barn. I thought then of our fixation with watching, particularly watching through camera lenses while never really being interesting in or involved with the thing we photograph. Earlier in the afternoon, I, my boyfriend and the precocious American student had been to the deer park at Klampenborg and had stopped by Eremitageslottet, a little castle on a hill. There were many people standing around taking pictures. One of us took a photo of the castle and then we walked away. We did not talk about the castle – not it’s history, not it’s function, not it’s architecture.